118645-is-this-enough-for-you-carbine
Content ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- Well, WS = subscription, sooo not really comparable | |} ---- Sure it is... but Blade and Soul make the same amount as well and it's sub based in Asia right now. Obviously when the free trials open up we'll get some influx. As long as they keep releasing content, the subs will grow like EVE did. | |} ---- ---- The nail on the head has been hit. A survey was done asking people what kind of coffee they liked. Most people responded they preferred a rich dark roast. However when presented with a taste test, those same people overwhelmingly preferred a weak, milky joe. Poor Carbine. They took it at people's word that they want a challenging game, with goal.that took time and effort to reach. Something like Vanilla WoW. When really, soon after people started quitting in droves, attunement was lowered to bronze and 40 man raids kicked the bucket 3 months into launch. Warplots were DoA. What Carbine should have done is make a milky game and then tell us it was dark roast. | |} ---- I hope you dont need really an answer to this... | |} ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- A nice free trial even for lapsed subscribers would work wonders here. | |} ---- Sadly, when asked about what they want to see in a server, the number 1 response was population/community . As an example: despite a myriad of complaints regarding PvP, the biggest complaint is that no one queues. This has been a long running issue, especially at higher levels. Now inertia has set in. People don't queue for PvP when wait time is unknown. Meaning, no one queues because no one queues. Hopefully Wildstar can make a way to make people feel like they are on a popular game with people to play with and talk to. Give incentive to queue for PvP somehow and make PvP seem like a viable thing to do. | |} ---- i personally still think this is something best saved for post drop 4 | |} ---- I'm not sure whether it should wait to be implemented. Advertised? That can wait. But giving lapsed subscribers a chance to check the optimization improvements seems like something they'd benefit from now. | |} ---- I don't think PVP will recover until we see a Wintergrasp type zone (but much much bigger, and more like GW2 WvWvW). | |} ---- possibly, but i think something can be said for the once bitten twice shy mentality, when people come back, it needs to be made sure, that the game is up to a standard that is ready to bring people back. there are many people that thnk because wildstar had a relatively bad initial response form the community it will never make it, im not among them. but i do believe you get a limited amount of "re-do's" with any community. | |} ---- I don't think WS is ready to bring ppl who quit back. Maybe its heading towards the right direction compared to launch, but it still has a lot to do in order to bring ppl back. Btw i also don't think optimization improvements are something that you can advertise, at least not yet. Optimization is still in very low levels. | |} ---- i hear this and dont deny it is happening, but i am really curious how up to date these computers are. im willing to bet people are thinking "it can run wow at max it should be able to run wildstar at max" like i said, im lucky enough to not have to deal with this, but something is weird about how bad people say it is, and how me and many in my guild that i talk to claim it is. | |} ---- Nobody here is throwing in any towels of any colour or form. ;P Our goal for WildStar has always been to make an amazing MMO experience for all players, a game that lets you choose the way you want to play and is made for gamers by gamers. Our teams are working very hard to address the feedback we received from players, fix issues, add exciting new content and more. So nobody is giving up, or "settling for less". We believe WildStar is an awesome game. There's room for improvement (there always is!) and we're listening carefully to your feedback and looking at ways we can improve the game for everybody. But we still think it's something special and we want to support it and you for a long time. :) I've never been given the impression that WildStar is *only* for a small group of particular players by any of the dev team. We certainly want those smaller groups to have a home in WildStar, we want to provide engaging content for them, but it's not just for that small group. There's a lot happening right now and we're hoping to give you guys an insight into our plans for 2015 soon. But I can promise you, nobody is waving the white flag here. | |} ---- ---- I'm not saying that isn't true, but I am saying that there's only so much Carbine can do. The game will never be perfect; even WoW is dealing with its own crop of bugs beyond even its notable server issues. Unfortunately, Carbine has to gamble. They switched to the quarterly drop to clear out bugs and give them more time for content. And this patch was freer of bugs and contained more content; the issue seems to be more that people didn't think it was three months free of bugs and three months full of content. During the two monthly drops, the feedback overwhelmingly called on Carbine to hit the brakes until they fixed the game. They tried that for three months, and by the third month people were pleading with them to release the patch, even with bugs, because the community would rather deal with bugs that are hotfixed than be without content for so long. So Carbine released the drop, it has bugs, and they're being criticized again. So Carbine needs to pick a side or the middle ground. Their current timeframe has drop 4 releasing two months after drop 3. That's where this gets interesting. By January, WoW's expansion will have sunk or swum, but Carbine's living on its fat reserves until they have a better trial plan. It would be nice to be able to wait until drop 4, after all the WoW hype may have died down and they'll have had more time (the panacea to all an MMORPGs issues). However, it becomes a business question at that point. Will the game be able to remain viable as it is and is NCSoft willing to accept "viable" and strike when they aren't aiming at a stone wall? Time will tell as far as that's concerned. We're lacking a few key pieces of information, though our latest public information says that Wildstar is holding steady. Not taking off, but not failing, just holding. If that trend continues or the numbers upswing slightly, I imagine you could well be right that new plans for inviting players back (or to Nexus for the first time) may wait for a major content patch rather than a bug fixing patch. If the numbers swing down, I have a feeling we'll see them try to break the siege before they starve. It's up in the air. People who were experiencing the most massive optimization problems (AMD incompatibility) received a pretty decent increase in performance. Carbine have said in their optimization notes for this drop that some improvements simply have to be in future content design, as in some things were designed that AMD drivers just don't handle well. That said, I have an AMD processor, and I noticed a noticable increase in game smoothness post-drop 3. Of course, there's a lot of room to improve. Optimization's a very tricky thing because you have to try to "optimize" for one kind of system without "breaking" another. It also doesn't help that Wildstar doesn't look hyper-realistic, so a lot of people completely underestimate the kind of wrenching muscle the game requires to function at a high level with its layered transparencies and shaders. Time will give them the space they need to hopefully write better optimization, or as is more likely the case time will simply catch the hardware up to the software. Unlike a lot of things, optimization is an ongoing balancing act where you're trying to squeeze more performance out of computers that you don't own without hurting the performance of other rigs; that's not something that really has a metric you can assign. It certainly helped some people, but we won't know until they come back. I'm assuming Carbine has some better metrics on hand with regards to reported FPS and data load, so if you're right, they'll hold off until they're in a place they feel comfortable. I doubt they're going to wait for it, though. Optimization can only carry you so far, and it's simply not going to matter as much as content. | |} ---- While you may have admitted that this Raptr program was not 100% accurate, I feel it was not even an astute one to use for some sort of metric since a minority of folks have some knowledge of it. Case point being that another poster asked what you have used to get your information from. However your findings did reflect upon the hype phase and people loosing interest post hype. The common knowledge of the gaming industry would indicate this is be expected, and since this is a more niche game from the get go of advertising in alpha phase, I find it not all that surprising that this game dropped that far in the list from your short study. The real question is, what would it look like a year from now? A year from launch? Or what would this list of yours look like when this game has more time to mature post one year? Now I doubt either Carbine, or NC Soft, could even answer your questions to your satisfactory given that most of the PR are trained to give minimal, vague, and positive answers to the public. Reflect upon their motto for a moment: "The Dev's Are Listening". While this is true they are listening to us very often, and they have been more open to us than their competitors, there are some things that cannot be said publicly for a variety of reasons. Even if they do answer these questions, often times I feel people will misinterpret them based upon their own desired reflections. While we are often left to speculate, hypothesize, or even create rumor base upon our emotions with the minimal amount of data we get, I feel we shall never get the satisfactory truth that people yearn for. | |} ---- ---- ---- ---- Agree 100% with your points and especially about hardcore. WS must get rid of this tag, enough damage has done already. | |} ---- Challenging dungeons are great... as end-game content. When you have to run progression discipline just to finish the level 20 dungeon and not even get enough currency to cover repairs that "#hardcore" stink is going to permeate long and strong. Challenging content is fine when the players have some control over the amount of challenge they have to deal with. WildStar requires far more concentration than other games I've played and it's persistent. Stress breaks are few and far between. This is not a recipe that appeals to the masses. Now before you judge me, I'm raising these issues to point out that Carbine has an either-or decision. They can keep the overall challenge and accept that they're only going to have niche appeal. Or they can adjust things so that challenge seekers need to work a little to find it and a broader segment of players gets less frustrated. | |} ---- I don't think "overall challenge" is the correct statement. Yes, dungeons are challenging. Yes, raids are challenging. Overall, Wildstar is NOT challenging. Some parts of it are. Not even all the instanced content is challenging. Adventures? Not challenging. Shiphands, not challenging. Excursions? Not challenging. Now, the place where they may have messed this up is adventures, because they might be too challenging while leveling. I seem to recall wiping a lot on Seige, when right now in Vet any of them are simply easy to run through. But either way, making challenging dungeons doesn't mean the game OVERALL is challenging. It's clear they strove to have some challenging and some less challenging content. Making ALL of the content hard or ALL of the content easy is not the answer. They might not have struck the right balance, but it's clear they were trying. | |} ---- Calling this out specifically because I've been thinking about why I don't enjoy adventures that much- and it's this: they are the "casual" instances in terms of challenge, but they are more unforgiving than dungeons. You can't get up and get a drink, answer the door, or put your child back in bed. Because if anyone has to take a break, you lose the adventure. If people DC, you lose the adventure. If someone messes up, you lose the adventure. They are actually more stressful than dungeons, requiring more concentration with fewer breaks, even though they are easier. When I got my new warrior to 50, I blasted through the adventures as quickly as possible to get to dungeons. This probably isn't what Carbine intends. The adventures can be a lot of fun, but the "one shot" nature of them where failure means a bunch of wasted time is not a good coupling with the "casual" content they are intended to be. WotW is kind of the exception here, but I can't put my finger on why. It's never struck me as stressful the way the others have. | |} ---- I think that would have been removing the timer as the metric by which medals are judged. The adventures are best when you want to spread out, not optimize your time and spam the fastest route. With that said, I'm never in a hurry with my guild group, so I've always liked the adventures more. You get more permutations. I think the answer lies in developing a more accurate metric of group efficiency for medaling purposes. I think it was a quick and dirty idea to use an overall timer; it's hard to screw one of those up. Given how old this game's audience skews, what with us having children and real life obligations at a higher rate than your average teens-have-to-go-to-dinner-all-of-a-sudden crew I'm used to partying with, it might behoove Carbine to come up with something that judges our skill a bit more and isn't as sensitive to IRL distractions. | |} ---- When you say things are "not challenging" you need to qualify that. They're not challenging for you. They present quite a bit of challenge to many, many people and they felt the rewards were not worth the level of effort required. That's the whole argument: Some people (the niche) like the baseline challenge. Others, well, didn't. | |} ---- Talking about adventures- they aren't judged by timers. | |} ---- Really? Is that a new change or was I just misunderstanding my old masters? I was pretty sure that I was consistently told to hurry along on my adventure runs and told exactly what choices to make so that we could speed through them for medals. | |} ---- Talking about Adventures (veterans- I'll admit there may be issues with leveling adventures), Shiphands, Excursions, and quests. I don't think any of these things were designed to be particularly hard. So if they *are* challenging, then I'd say that was a mistake (I do think adventures were meant to be a step up from Shiphands and Excursions). But are ther are lot of people who find questing, excursions, shiphands, and vet adventures to be difficult to the point of them not being fun? Even some of the most casual (in terms of their desire to learn game mechanics and study their class) players I've met in the game have had no problem questing and doing veteran adventures. I *do* think the dungeons are challenging, which is cool because it's nice to have some challenging content in the game while leveling. | |} ---- I think you misunderstood. People rushed you along because they just wanted to get them over with. | |} ---- That astounds me. To this day, I still think the adventures are more fun. You get to mix and match so much, especially in a premade when you get to say, "Mmm, let's do it this way this time." Blitzing through and spam running the same path was painful. I was told (at least I recall being told) that we needed to do it for the gold medal. So what are they judging those medals on and why couldn't they do that on dungeons? If anything, I've had the opposite problem. I thought that the entire reason I was being rushed through dungeons and adventures was because people wanted gold and you couldn't even stop to yell at your dogs to knock something off. Are the dungeons at least being checked by overall timer? I was pretty certain about that considering the attunement anger out there a few months back. | |} ---- Dungeons are on a timer to get silver/gold. I *like* the timers in the dungeons. They add a little bit of extra kick into the encounter and push things along efficiently. If you don't get it, no big deal. But they are fun to shoot for. They were more painful when they were required for attunment because people would just quit if the timer wasn't met. Adventures have various measures for silver/gold, but none of them are time based. For example, in seige the generator has to stay at 100% (or above 96%?) for gold. It doesn't matter what else happens, who dies, or how long it takes, as long as your protect the generator. | |} ---- See, that seems like a better system for dungeons precisely because of the problems you enumerated for adventures, that you can't really stop if something comes up. I have no issue judging people in dungeons on mechanics efficiency. Hell, for all I know, I'm not the only person in the game since launch that was told I needed to clear adventures in a certain amount of time to medal. I actually feel better about doing adventures knowing that what they're judging me on is how well I do things, not how much I can avoid in the game and ignore IRL. I kind of hope one day they implement that challenge mode idea from my PVE treatise. Judge the medals on something else, then give people the option to add extra mechanical considerations or disadvantages to drive up the difficulty later for people who think running the content is getting casual. I do still want that proposed mode where the friction is turned way down on the ground. | |} ---- The problem is that adventures are non stop. You can't take a break in them the way you can a dungeon. I guess you can in seige in between waves, but the others will just keep going. I definitely feel more stressed doing adventures. | |} ---- Well also to add to this at various points in time different aspects of the adventures were buggy enough to halt or hamper progression depending on a mechanic or choice. So the cookie cutter paths grew out of those as a result for being "safe". I remember Crimelords for example being a pain early on because Protostar path would bug out and couldn't finish the adventure and Tempest Refuge we were all told not to use snipers because they'd bug and your progress would be completely halted. While to my knowledge most if not all of this was fixed, the lasting effects and a significant portion of guides people watch still echo the impact on people to play it safe. | |} ---- Absolutely. Bugs created the "one true path" through adventures because you were punished dearly if you went the wrong way. However, rushing through the adventures was just about wanting to get through them. Which I'll admit, I rush through them now and I don't enjoy deviating from the normal path. I think, in the end, adventures just aren't for me. Except WotW- I really do like WotW. | |} ---- ---- ---- ---- yes, this is how Niche MMOs work and feel. Expect to find similar things in any MMO that's below 1 million players. | |} ---- | |} ---- You do know what arena is right? most people get there rating there, usually 4-20 for bgs personally depending on what time it is which I can deal with for now. I do hope they're thinking of ways of revitalizing pvp though. there are a good amount of players just not many that pvp because they think they lose due to lack of t2 gear. I could screenshot me consistently doing at least 300-500k more dmg than mostly every player in bgs while on my alt and I know the other players are in t2. | |} ---- ----